I’m not quite sure what to make of “Cobweb.“ On the one hand, it’s creepy and evocative. While it never produces any real jump scares, it maintains a sense of unease throughout its entirety. On the other hand, once it’s done, and you sit back to think about what you watched, a lot of it…

The imaginary friend has a long lineage in Hollywood. I’m reminded of “Harvey,“ which featured a Jimmy Stewart character who claimed to rub shoulders with a giant talking rabbit. There’s a lesser-known comedy from the 80s, “Drop Dead Fred,“ where Phoebe Cates’ childhood pal reappears in her life when she’s an adult, causing havoc. “Daniel…

This one could’ve been worse. A lot of these cheeseball 1970s/80s slashers tend to feel more like an episode of Quincy M.E. or The A-Team, than anything with genuine tension or drama. (Note for young folks: I’m referencing old TV shows that upon re-watching almost always make you ask, “How did I ever watch this?”) …

When I was growing up in Honolulu in the 1970s, my mom often took me to strange movies that my young brain really had little chance of comprehending. Orson Welles’ version of the Franz Kafka short story “The Trial“ (starring Anthony Perkins) was one such film. I recall seeing it as a confusing melange of…

Hmmm…. how do I say this nicely? This movie was a bag of crap balls. Let’s peruse the setup. Teenage Ellie lives with her parents and younger sister in a suburban planned community, presumably somewhere a bit east of LA. Both parents are screwing around—Mom with the hunky neighbor, Dad with the hired help. When…

I am a big fan of the hard rock group AC/DC. This is despite the fact that they’ve been releasing what is essentially the same album—with largely interchangeable pounding hard rock riffs—for something like 50 years. I would despise any other band for this crime, but these guys have found a formula that works and…

I’ll cut to the chase for the short attention span crowd: “The Other” is worth a watch despite a few flaws. The setup: A young white couple take in a Black foster daughter who’s around ten or so. Kathelia stands out because she seems entirely mute and spends most waking moments staring out at the…

The setup here is pretty straightforward: a large house suddenly appears in a rural section of a northeaster US town. Trapped in the house is a group of people, all of whom have secrets the house seems to know about. I liked a lot of this. The mysterious nature of the house was compelling. The…

My recent viewing of “The Thirteenth Floor” was actually a rewatch for me; I first saw it when it came out back in 1999. The film, about a virtual reality populated by sentient AI (that’s not the terminology used, but what would you call it today) was somewhat overshadowed at the time. “The Matrix”, the…

How did people digest movies like “Persona” before the Internet? Before the time when you could open up Google, type, “What the hell did I just watch?“ and get some answers. I suppose they had to get together with other people, chain-smoke cigarettes, down espressos, and discuss the film. It doesn’t sound so bad, really.…

This is a good one. I came to watch “Watcher” by way of another movie. I happened across the serial killer short “Slut” on youtube and was impressed with its tense riff on the Red Riding Hood story set in what I took to be 1980s Texas. So impressed was I that I looked for…

More comedy than horror, Three Fingered Willy draws inspiration from classic ’80s campground slashers—Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp, etc.—while adding its own comic twists.If you like your horror bloody, you’ll be pleased that amid the campy dialogue and teen soap opera angst are some genuinely brutal kills. The author clearly did some deep thinking about…

Have you ever psychoanalyzed an alien? That’s the premise behind the Russian film “Sputnik” which was released in 2020. How does this situation come about? Two Russian cosmonauts are floating in space in the 1980s when their ship encounters… something. It’s never really clear what, and not really necessary to understand. Later, when they crash…

Early on in my viewing of “Hell of a Summer” I took a note that read: This is as if Woody Allen made a slasher. As the film went on, I realized that summation wasn’t quite right, but it wasn’t totally off. The film is definitely in the comedy/horror space, and the comedy is mostly…

Many years back, with films like “Hostel” and the “Saw” series, we had the advent of what was called torture porn. This basically involved scenes of people being strapped down and gruesomely mutilated. With 2017’s “Truth or Dare“, we have what I would call “self torture porn.“ The plot is basic enough. Several college students…